Georges Méliès

His father had moved to Paris in 1843 as a shoemaker and began working at a boot factory, where he met Méliès' mother.

Johannah-Catherine's father had been the official bootmaker of the Dutch court before a fire ruined his business.

Eventually the two married, founded a high-quality boot factory on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and had sons Henri and Gaston; by the time their third son Georges, had been born, the family had become wealthy.

Georges Méliès attended the Lycée Michelet from age seven until it was bombed during the Franco-Prussian War; he was then sent to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

In his memoirs, Méliès emphasised his formal, classical education, in contrast to accusations early in his career that most filmmakers had been "illiterates incapable of producing anything artistic."

However, he acknowledged that his creative instincts usually outweighed intellectual ones: "The artistic passion was too strong for him, and while he pondered a French composition or Latin verse, his pen mechanically sketched portraits or caricatures of his professors or classmates, if not some fantasy palace or an original landscape that already had the look of a theatre set."

Often disciplined by teachers for covering his notebooks and textbooks with drawings, young Georges began building cardboard puppet theatres at age 10 and crafted sophisticated marionettes as a teenager.

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) was a French magician, actor, and film director.

He led many technical and narrative developments in the early days of cinema.

Méliès was well known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour.

He was also one of the early filmmakers to use storyboards.

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was born 8 December 1861 in Paris, son of Jean-Louis Méliès and his Dutch wife Johannah-Catherine Schuering.

Méliès graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat in 1880.

After completing his education, Méliès joined his brothers in the family shoe business, where he learned how to sew.

After three years' mandatory military service, his father sent him to London to work as a clerk for a family friend and to improve his English.

While in London, he began to visit the Egyptian Hall, run by the London illusionist John Nevil Maskelyne, and he developed a lifelong passion for stage magic.

Méliès returned to Paris in 1885 with a new desire: to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts.

His father, however, refused to support him financially as an artist, so Georges settled with supervising the machinery at the family factory.

That same year, he avoided his family's desire for him to marry his brother's sister-in-law and instead married Eugénie Génin, a family friend's daughter whose guardians had left her a sizable dowry.

They had two children: Georgette, born in 1888, and André, born in 1901.

While working at the family factory, Méliès continued to cultivate his interest in stage magic, attending performances at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, which had been founded by the magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin.

He also began taking magic lessons from Emile Voisin, who gave him the opportunity to perform his first public shows, at the Cabinet Fantastique of the Grévin Wax Museum and, later, at the Galerie Vivienne.

In 1888, Méliès' father retired, and Georges Méliès sold his share of the family shoe business to his two brothers.

With the money from the sale and from his wife's dowry, he purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.

Although the theatre was "superb" and equipped with lights, levers, trap doors, and several automata, many of the available illusions and tricks were out of date, and attendance to the theatre was low even after Méliès' initial renovations.

Over the next nine years, Méliès personally created over 30 new illusions that brought more comedy and melodramatic pageantry to performances, much like those Méliès had seen in London, and attendance greatly improved.

One of his best-known illusions was the Recalcitrant Decapitated Man, in which a professor's head is cut off in the middle of a speech and continues talking until it is returned to his body.

When he purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, Méliès also inherited its chief mechanic Eugène Calmels and such performers as Jehanne d'Alcy, who became his mistress and later his second wife.

While running the theatre, Méliès also worked as a political cartoonist for the liberal newspaper La Griffe, which was edited by his cousin Adolphe Méliès.

On 28 December 1895, Méliès attended a special private demonstration of the Lumière brothers' cinematograph, given for owners of Parisian houses of spectacle.

Méliès immediately offered the Lumières 10,000 francs for one of their machines; the Lumières refused, anxious to keep a close control on their invention and to emphasize the scientific nature of the device.

(For the same reasons, they refused the Musée Grévin's 20,000 francs bid and the Folies Bergère's 50,000 francs bid the same night.) Méliès, intent on finding a film projector for the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, turned elsewhere; numerous other inventors in Europe and America were experimenting with machines similar to the Lumières' invention, albeit at a less technically sophisticated level.

Possibly acting on a tip from Jehanne d'Alcy, who may have seen Robert W. Paul's Animatograph film projector while on tour in England, Méliès traveled to London.

He bought an Animatograph from Paul, as well as several short films sold by Paul and by the Edison Manufacturing Company.

By April 1896, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was showing films as part of its daily performances.

Méliès, after studying the design of the Animatograph, modified the machine so that it served as a film camera.

As raw film stock and film processing labs were not yet available in Paris, Méliès purchased unperforated film in London, and personally developed and printed his films through trial and error.

In September 1896, Méliès, Lucien Korsten, and Lucien Reulos patented the Kinétographe Robert-Houdin, a cast iron camera-projector, which Méliès referred to as his "coffee grinder" and "machine gun" because of the noise that it made.

By 1897 technology had caught up and better cameras were put on sale in Paris, leading Méliès to discard his own camera and purchase several better cameras made by Gaumont, the Lumières, and Pathé.

His films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy.